From April 26 to 28, I was in Milan, on my own, to see the city and take a break from day-to-day life. It was not my first solo travel experience – I’ve been to Paris, Sao Paulo, New York, Berlin on my own – but it was certainly a new kind of travel experience for me.

My mindset is what set this one apart from the previous journeys.

Previously, solo travel has been a somewhat tortuous process for me. Despite the fact that I appreciated each experience in hindsight and found it well worth doing, in the moment of travelling, alone and often bored, confronted with expectations of what solo travel should look like and how enjoyable it should be, I was often quite frustrated. (more…)

Freedom of choice is a foundational value of capitalism, and of democracies. While it has benefits in the context of those two collective systems, I believe it is a destructive force in many people’s personal lives.

Choices are necessary, and I am not suggesting you run from them – on the contrary – but it is important to master them and not let them possess you. Something as fundamental as a choice might be something we encounter often in life, but that does not mean we have learned how to master it. (more…)

Someone recently said to me over dinner: ‘Why are people so racist and voting for Trump or Le Pen?’ A lively discussion ensued, which made some ideas clearer to me and highlighted some common views of the world that I think are not accurate. For that reason, I want to talk about them here.

To the liberal metropolitan people that I and most of my friends feel like we belong, what’s been going on in terms of Trump’s election, Brexit and Le Pen’s good poll numbers is frightening and mysterious. Why do people make such obviously wrong decisions? (more…)

Rob Siltanen, the creative director of an ad agency famous for working with Apple in its early days, wrote in an ad campaign:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.”(more…)

I have already written about Buddhist thought on this blog, and part of Buddhist meditation is about being fully present. This is extremely important and shows that Buddhism has a deep understanding of how we experience reality.

What does that mean?

Well, have you ever experienced flow? Have you ever been so absorbed in what you were doing, be it dancing, working, drawing, running, or even a good discussion with a friend? That is a moment where you were present, and fully in the present, without your mind being drawn away from that moment to other places and times. If you’ve ever experienced this, you know it makes you profoundly happy. (more…)

After years of dabbling in meditation, and after having been inspired by the wonderful books of Daniel M. Ingram, Alan Watts, D.T. Suzuki and Culadasa, I’ve been getting more serious about it and meditating almost every day for close to three months. That might not sound like much, but to my personal life it has already made an enormous difference. I feel blessed to have discovered how powerful it is, and that is why I want to share my thoughts to inspire others.

As Martin Jacques suggests in his book When China rules the World, further development will not lead to China becoming like the West. Instead, Chinese modernity carries its own cultural idiosyncrasies, as Japanese modernity does: even though Japan is at least as developed as Europe and Northern America, it is very different in even the most basic features of its society, including its social relationships and the role of its institutions.

This in itself is a lesson in humility. China will develop in its own interesting way, so we do not have a blueprint for how things work out. Indeed, it might be suggested that instead of all countries converging on Western liberal market democracy as the ultimate form of the state, developing countries might well get inspiration from other, well-functioning and fast-growing countries like China, which enjoy a lot of social peace despite not having the same kinds of freedoms as the West does. (more…)

Note for the long-time subscribers of this blog: This post is mostly about philosophical thinking, it’s not centred on investing, so you might want to skip it if that’s not your thing.

After reading Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, an excellent children’s book that’s also an introduction to the history of philosophy, I felt it might be quite useful to talk about a very important distinction about what truth means.

In the history of philosophy, it’s quite obvious that what is held to be true in one age or century can be deemed false a few decades later, so how much of an actual absolute truth is there really to find? Do we even have a deep, unchanging nature that philosophy can tell us about? According to French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, the answer is no. (more…)